The Limits

A Novel

By: Nell Freudenberger

Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman

The most thrilling work yet from the best-selling, prize-winning author of The Newlyweds and Lost and Wanted, a stunning new novel set in French Polynesia and New York City about three characters who undergo massive transformations over the course of a single year

“A big-hearted, tightly-plotted novel that bravely takes on our times by looking at the timeless stuff of human intimacy. The Limits is an immersive and powerful book.” –Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind

From Mo’orea, a tiny volcanic island off the coast of Tahiti, a French biologist obsessed with saving Polynesia’s imperiled coral reefs sends her teenage daughter to live with her ex-husband in New York. By the time fifteen-year-old Pia arrives at her father Stephen’s luxury apartment in Manhattan and meets his new, younger wife, Kate, she has been shuttled between her parents’ disparate lives—her father’s consuming work as a surgeon at an overwhelmed New York hospital, her mother’s relentless drive against a ticking ecological clock—for most of her life. Fluent in French, intellectually precocious, moving between cultures with seeming ease, Pia arrives in New York poised for a rebellion, just as COVID sends her and her stepmother together into near total isolation.

A New York City schoolteacher, Kate struggles to connect with a teenager whose capacity for destruction seems exceeded only by her privilege. Even as Kate fails to parent Pia—and questions her own ability to become a mother—one of her sixteen-year-old students is already caring for a toddler full time. Athyna’s love for her nephew, Marcus, is a burden that becomes heavier as she struggles to finish her senior year online. Juggling her manifold responsibilities, Athyna finds herself more and more anxious every time she leaves the house. Just as her fear of what is waiting for her outside her Staten Island community feels insupportable, an incident at home makes her desperate to leave.

When their lives collide, Pia and Athyna spiral toward parallel but inescapably different tragedies. Moving from a South Pacific “paradise,” where rage still simmers against the colonial government and its devastating nuclear tests, to the extreme inequalities of twenty-first century New York City, The Limits is an unforgettably moving novel about nation, race, class, and family. Heart-wrenching and humane, a profound work from one of America’s most prodigiously gifted novelists.

©2024 Nell Freudenberger (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"[The Limits] displays one of the most impressive aspects of Freudenberger’s work: Deep research is effortlessly deployed in the service of a story and pressing contemporary issues are woven seamlessly into the fabric of the novel. Here, Freudenberger’s moral passion about the capitalistic exploitation of natural resources and the horrors of climate change charges the novel with an ethical force. As always, her graceful, limpid writing style makes the novel eminently readable.”—The Boston Globe

“Deeply moving . . . An astonishingly real­istic portrayal of every­day people facing the challenges of modern life.”–Real Simple

“Engaging . . . The Limits is insightful about the ways the Covid crisis applied pressure to unsteady joints, as if testing which bonds would last.”—Wall Street Journal

Extraordinary!

A truly wonderful book by a gifted writer - it’s very hard to put down and it will stay with you in profound ways!

A complex family navigates climate change, and the pandemic, in New York and French Polynesia

This was one of the best books of the year for me. It focuses on the two wives and family of a prominent NY cardiologist during the COVID pandemic. The 1st wife is a marine biologist conducting research in French Polynesia. The 2nd, current wife, is a NY public school teacher who is both newly pregnant, and suddenly given tremendous responsibility for caring for her teen aged step-daughter after she's sent from French Polynesia to NY for school. The relationships and fault lines between all the characters are depicted with clarity. The author deftly interweaves climate change, the pandemic, issues of environmental damage caused by the global west to the environment of French Polynesia, and economic and social justice into a compelling story. The novel moves between characters and locations seamlessly. I'm looking forward to reading this author's earlier novels.

A feeble story

So disappointed in this book. Read one of her short stories from the New Yorker and loved it. So I thought I’d try a novel. This novel is faux intellectual and is pretty thin gruel for someone published in the New Yorker. She hits all the fads: global warming, identity politics, angst ridden adolescence, uninformed COVID hysteria. How
many book reviews do I have to read to ensure, at least, a passable book. Perhaps AI can help here.

Did not finish

Could not get into the book. It couldn’t keep my interest. My first DNF In years.